News & Events

Latest Press Releases

Researchers specializing in childhood development with AIR will discuss topics ranging from childcare and teacher professional development to transitional kindergarten and early childhood programs in Palestine during the Society for Research in Childhood Development 2015 Biennial Meeting, which is taking place March 19 – 21 in Philadelphia, PA.

The American Institutes for Research will participate in the 2015 annual conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, being held March 8-13 in Washington, D.C. AIR experts are scheduled to speak about a variety of topics, including education and the Ebola crisis in Liberia, research using large-scale international data, early childhood education, data analysis, educational inequalities and student achievement, literacy in North America and mathematical achievement.

Researchers from the American Institutes for Research will give presentations on a broad range of education research topics during the Society for Research on Education Effectiveness conference March 4-7, 2015 in Washington, D.C. The conference theme, Learning Curves: Creating and Sustaining Gains from Early Childhood through Adulthood, explores the role of research in understanding and supporting learning and growth from preschool through college and beyond.

American Institutes for Research experts will participate in the 2015 Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education, a gathering aimed at seeking agile approaches to research and development that will improve education practices. Participants reflect a broad cross section of education experts, from researchers to practitioners and policymakers, who will gather March 2-4, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco for the summit.

Commentary, Op-Ed and Testimony

In a New York Times op-ed, Bill Gates writes passionately about the lack of an effective international system to contain and defeat a future pandemic. He urges the United Nations to create a new organization responsible for worldwide planning and coordinated response. AIR researchers Julia Galdo and Alicia Eberl-Lefko contend the responsibility for preparing belongs to all of us.

More than a dozen years after it was reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is under hot debate. Why the heat? Although the act has boosted student achievement (a major goal), not all students demonstrated proficiency on state tests by 2014 (the real endgame). Nor has the act’s aim of making sure all students have access to an effective teacher been met.

Washington is taking a close look at Title II, Part A (Title IIA) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as Congress debates reauthorization. AIR's new policy brief looks at how teacher professional development, as defined in the law and pursued in districts across the country, has shown mixed—mostly disappointing—effects on teacher practice and student learning.

Events in Ferguson and the Justice Department’s new report on policing raise questions about fragile police-community relationships in vulnerable communities. AIR expert Patricia Campie asks, "are we measuring the right things?" Over time, combining measures of what matters to community members with conventional crime data could help restore two-way trust and combat the hopelessness many now feel.

In an OpEd for the Los Angeles Times, AIR expert Dan Goldhaber advises that "Educational opportunity is knocking," urging California to try out the high-pay/high-performance teacher model. "If results here match those in New York, California will have a path forward to achieve big student gains for a fairly small taxpayer investment."